I started monetizing it for Hacker News readers because I got tired of the hateful venom in the comments section. I figured if people are going to get angry at me, I might as well get paid for it. The ads have made enough that it's a tax problem, but overall I do make enough off of them to fund ridiculous ventures like uploading my entire stream VODs to my CDN: https://xeiaso.net/vods.

The ads really do make up for the costs involved in serving things over my CDN (AVIF images being widely supported and my video compression experiments https://xeiaso.net/blog/video-compression help). It's not enough to make me quit my dayjob (I would probably not want to do that anyways), but it's enough that the passive income pays for all my video games: https://xeiaso.net/blog/blog-profit-2022.

So, yes. There's ads. Blame other Hacker News users being toxic for why they exist. Maybe we can have a better world where people are just nice to other people, but until then I put ads on the blog so that my side projects are more sustainable.